Sony Charging Publishers for Free PS3 Game Demo Downloads

It's free to you, but costly to publishers.

You know those free demos and the downloadable content that you nab so care-free to try out new games and extend your current titles? It's costing publishers a decent bit of cash every time someone downloads this stuff on the PlayStation Network. 

MTV Multiplayer has learned that Sony implemented a per-gigabyte download charge to publishers on October 1st of last year for free content. It now costs publishers $0.16 per downloaded gigabyte, which while seemingly small, adds up to big numbers in the long run. As demos often hover around the 1GB mark these days, that means that for every one million downloads of a demo of that size, the publisher has to fork over $160,000 in fees. This charge is only in effect for the first 60 days of a piece of content's availability, but that's obviously when most of the downloads happen anyway. Paid content is not affected by this fee. 

Microsoft and Nintendo do not charge download fees, which could be part of the reason that many demos hit Xbox Live a week before the PlayStation Network - cross-platform gamers would have already downloaded it on Xbox Live, and therefore wouldn't need to nab it again on the PlayStation Network, saving the publisher some cash.

Read the whole article @ IGN

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